Before the Ghost Tide, safe houses had been a niche topic.
The people who cared about them were mostly the ones driven half-mad by apocalypse novels, brainwashed by cults, or fanatically attached to their own lives.
After the Ghost Tide broke out, and the crime rate soared along with it, the safe house was no longer a hypothetical.
They ranged from a single alloy door and a stock of apocalypse supplies, all the way to a fully custom-built home.
At the start of the Ghost Tide, safe houses caught fire, and prices were driven to obscene heights.
When the southern Ghost Tide erupted decades ago, nine houses in ten had emptied—and even the tide-free north was swept up in a safe-house craze.
But in recent years people had found the Ghost Tide wasn't so terrifying after all—especially in the north, where ghosts were few and the odds of running into one were slim.
That, plus a new safe-house company opening every day, sent prices tumbling back down.
The one receiving Chen Qing was called Manager Jin.
"Undefeated East Safe House Company focuses on ghost defense—a single wall packs several layers of black-dog blood, glutinous rice, black-donkey hooves, and so on, plus runes blessed by a master..."
"Three Hundred Guardians focuses on defense against people—the whole structure is aluminum alloy, titanium alloy, chrome-molybdenum steel, tungsten steel, HRC hardness anywhere from 35 to 70, with cameras, generators, a diesel store, weapons and firearms, and a medicine room all included."
In any age of chaos, weapons sprang up like seedlings after a long drought's first rain. In a world like this one, firearms were semi-legal, and special rounds could actually harm ordinary ghosts.
Chen Qing questioned him closely, point by point.
With the Zhong Kui painting, what he truly feared now was other humans.
So a little ghost defense was plenty, but the anti-personnel measures—alloy walls, firearms, and the rest—all had to be arranged.
On top of that, pepper spray, stun batons, electrified nets, tear gas, and the like.
The more the better!
"Tungsten steel runs as hard as HRC 70, though I'd recommend the HRC 65 chrome-molybdenum steel instead..."
"Shall I call someone over from Three Hundred Guardians to talk it through?"
"Yes," Chen Qing nodded.
Before long, the man from Three Hundred Guardians arrived.
This one was far more professional than Manager Jin.
"Hello, Mr. Chen. My surname is Yang—here's my card."
"Have you considered a small farm, Mr. Chen?"
"If your rooms are large enough, you can build a small farm—here's a vertical-farm layout. Using the crops we recommend, you can produce about three kilograms of vegetables per square meter per week. For a staple, I'd suggest potatoes—the Qingshu 9E variety, say. With temperature and humidity properly controlled, an 80-day cycle can yield up to 90 kilograms."
"The soil fertilizer is a blend we mix ourselves. Combined with bio-fertilizer—that is, human waste—it can generally be recycled around 300 times. Even under intensive planting, fifty years is doable."
"There's also a water-collection room. You just leave a hole, extend the collection rod outside and open it, and you gather about a liter of water a day. On rainy or overcast days, more."
"The medical room comes stocked with common medicines—minor illnesses are no trouble—plus a set of pre-loaded self-administered IV drips. Foolproof; you just stick one on and it runs. Antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, and the like will basically cure any ailment."
"And there's an entertainment room, with 200 terabytes of novels and comics—about 900 billion characters of fiction, roughly 100,000 web novels of five million characters each, plus 60,000 anime series. It covers just about every genre—action, fighting, romance, erotica, all of it."
"The games come to 1.9 petabytes total—about 5,000 major titles and around 200,000 mini-games."
"The console's chips, graphics card, and memory are all mature, well-proven models with more than enough horsepower. Generally good for a dozen-plus years, and we prepare spare parts besides."
"Video storage runs about 3.1 petabytes. At 1080p, that stores roughly six million hours of footage—movies, TV dramas, variety shows—allocated however you like."
"There's a gym too, and it even comes with a silicone doll—the key parts are replaceable..."
...
After years of development, safe houses were now extremely thorough, providing food, drink, and every diversion imaginable.
Everything Chen Qing had thought of, and plenty he hadn't, others already had extremely professional solutions for.
The one big problem now was that the apartment wasn't large enough.
There was no room for all these facilities.
Move house?
High-rises were the first thing ruled out. Too many ghosts could fly.
A six-story building... there weren't a lot of options there either.
Riverside Community sat by the water. Apart from the drowned ghosts and their like, ghosts generally feared water—which was excellent.
The community was hemmed by streets on all four sides, like a single wall, and his own home sat right in the middle—also excellent.
"A few hundred square meters, and it has to get sunlight. Roughly how much would a place like that cost?"
"Either a villa or an estate. In the villa district on the west side, a three-story townhouse generally runs about seven million. Usable floor area of around 300 square meters, with a garden of about 70."
He could easily afford it!
Chen Qing was tempted. "And turning a villa into a safe house—how much?"
"That might get a bit pricey. Three hundred square meters is already sizable. Add the household farm on the ground floor, which requires a fully enclosed protective structure, and the price runs about 46 million."
"Because with a villa everything has to be custom-built, the timeline is about three months."
"..." Chen Qing was speechless.
At last he understood why people said villas were easy to buy but a nightmare to fit out.
Most of all: three months was long enough to die several times over!
He ran a quick mental tally. At a villa's scale, there was no way to do it cheap.
But the household farm—that he had to have!
Ordinarily you wouldn't spare a cabbage or a tomato a second glance, but in the apocalypse, a craving for one bite of vegetables could drive you insane.
"My place is on the top floor. If these facilities were extended onto the roof... could it bear the weight?"
"Mr. Chen, what you may not realize is that Great Tang buildings are designed with a strength margin of at least 30 percent above the mandatory standard—usually 40 to 60. Old communities like this one used even more solid materials; load-bearing is no problem. And we reinforce the structure during construction. Even less of a problem."
Chen Qing brightened, and the words popped right out. "What if the ground floor gets blown up?"
Manager Yang blinked. "Explosives are tightly controlled; ordinary people can't get their hands on them. If someone could get explosives, then a safe house on the first floor or the sixth is all the same to them."
"Because with a large enough charge, even if the safe house holds, the shock could kill the people inside right through it."
Then the sixth floor it was—at least you could grow vegetables on the roof!
"Only..."
Manager Yang hesitated a long while before voicing his worry:
"The top floor is an excellent choice, but... it's an illegal addition. Enforcement is lax right now, but if someone reports it and it's discovered, you could be ordered to tear it down."
"It's fine!" Chen Qing said.
If someone really did report it, at the pace of Great Tang officialdom, the various departments would pass the buck back and forth a few times—and the Blood Moon would arrive first.
But Manager Yang's mind went somewhere else:
This young man clearly had government connections! He could grease all the right joints.
Thinking so, he naturally valued Chen Qing a good deal more.
Next came the price talk.
Manager Yang was refreshingly candid; he even listed the market price of chrome-molybdenum steel, then quickly estimated the cost off the blueprints.
The pricing was fair—by his own account, they only made about 5 percent.
But item by item, the total began to weigh even on Chen Qing.
The medical room—an absolute must!
And medicine? Also money.
Cold and pain remedies had to be well stocked.
Glucose, anti-inflammatories, antibiotics, painkillers, all stocked up.
Throw in some rarer drugs.
Tallied up: 850,000!
The entertainment room was the bigger expense.
Skip terabytes; storage measured in petabytes had a nice ring to it.
But assembled into a NAS, each petabyte cost close to 100,000!
Add the various gaming devices and spare parts, and the entertainment room barreled straight to 1.3 million!
For food he didn't even bother running to the supermarket—he ordered 125 cubic meters of assorted canned goods right there. There was so much it could only go on the roof.
For power, beyond a diesel generator there were solar panels blanketing the roof, plus wind turbines and hand-crank generators, each with its own spare parts.
And the household super-farm—nothing but dirt, really, yet somehow sold by the kilogram.
Add this, add that, and the price climbed to 14 million.
Over budget!
Manager Jin smiled at just the right moment. "Mr. Chen, how would you like to pay? What down payment were you thinking?"
Down payment?
Right! How had he forgotten that?
His eyes lit up. "What's the lowest the down payment can go?"
"Usually 40 percent, but as a silver-card holder, you can go as low as 20."
Sweet!
Chen Qing was overjoyed!
To his ears, this was the same as an "80-percent-off clearance sale."
A true tearful liquidation!
Now it was more than enough!
He bought some firearms and ammunition too.
All told it came to only about three million.
All three men were pleased.
Chen Qing had bought a safe house at a fire-sale price; Manager Yang had closed a 14-million deal; Manager Jin had landed a loan in the millions.
If the house hadn't been unprepared, it would have been worth a toast.
Chen Qing thought for a moment and asked, "Manager Yang, you're the expert. By the standard of 'just staying alive,' what gives the most bang for your buck?"
In the apocalypse, every mouthful of food was a priceless treasure!
Food was the hard currency of the end times.
As long as you had food, anything you could think of could be bought.
He and Chen Man would of course eat the finest delicacies. But food used as a bargaining chip only had to be edible—the more of it, the better.
Manager Yang smiled and gave an answer Chen Qing hadn't expected:
"Pig feed."
Huh?
Chen Qing blinked.
"Pig feed is usually made from the oil-cake at oil mills—soybean, peanut, sesame, corn, the residue left after the oil's been pressed out."
"High-carb, high-protein, low-fat, all-natural, and they even blend in vitamins for you. Honestly, forget the end times—even right now, it's healthier than what most people eat."
Nice!
Chen Qing had mulled this problem over. His plan had been to buy raw materials directly—wheat, corn, and so on—and figure out later whether he could process them himself.
He'd never dreamed a single shift in thinking would open things up so completely!
"How's pig feed usually sold?"
"In small amounts, about two yuan a catty. In bulk... uh, a bit over one yuan a catty should get it done."
Settled!
This was the one!
Stockpile enough pig feed, and spend it like cash in the apocalypse!